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Alexander Blachly
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Alexander Blachly has been performing, teaching, and contributing scholarship within the rarefied world of early music for more than three decades. He conducts, tours, and records with Pomerium (named for the famous Italian Trecento music theory treatise), which Blachly himself founded in 1972. He has taught early music courses and directed amateur and student early music ensembles at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, New York
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Biography |
by Timothy Dickey
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Alexander Blachly has been performing, teaching, and contributing scholarship within the rarefied world of early music for more than three decades. He conducts, tours, and records with Pomerium (named for the famous Italian Trecento music theory treatise), which Blachly himself founded in 1972. He has taught early music courses and directed amateur and student early music ensembles at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Rutgers University, and the University of Pennsylvania (ensemble Ancient Voices). Since 1993, he has been director of choral music at Notre Dame University, where he directs the university chorale and chamber orchestra, as well as the university's Schola Musicorum (with Calvin Bower). He earned a PhD degree from Columbia University in 1995, with active and ongoing research in the fifteenth century understanding of musical tempo, and the contemporary systems of mensuration (these mensurations are the forerunners of modern time signatures, but operate in a much subtler musical system in which note values are relative rather than fixed). His aesthetic approach, however, tends toward musicality and away from slavish devotion to the proportions.
Blachly won the 1992 Noah Greenberg Award given by the American Musicological Society "to stimulate active cooperation between scholars and performers by recognizing and fostering outstanding contributions to historical performing practices"; his ensemble Pomerium was nominated for a Gramophone award in 1999 for early music. Since the group's inception in 1972, Blachly and the group have released nine CD recordings, centering on the music of fifteenth and sixteenth century sacred polyphony. They have toured extensively in Europe, America, and Japan, including appearances at the Festival di Musica Sacra Bressanone e Bolzano, the Tage Alter Musik Festival (Regensburg, Germany), the Flanders Festival Antwerp, and the Holland Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht. |
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